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Home , Charles Baudelaire

Chapter 3 Baudelaire’s Parisian Cityscape: and Le Spleen de

La vie parisienne est féconde en sujets poétiques et merveilleux. Le merveilleux nous enveloppe et nous abreuve comme l’atmosphère; mais nous ne le voyons pas. — Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1846

Diderot, Goethe, Shakespeare, autant de produc- teurs, autant d’admirables critiques. — Charles Baudelaire, “ et Tannhäuser à Paris”

Norman Bryson provocatively calls the Salons as conceived by Dide- rot and Grimm “an act of unprecedented and magnificent waste.”1 He bases this claim on what he sees as a convergence of influences all conspiring to make the Paris Salons of this period the center of Euro- pean intellectual and artistic activity: First, at the time of their writing, Diderot was at the height of his influence, having just completed the Encyclopédie project, and had been given complete artistic freedom to write about each of the biennial Salons; Second, the idea of the “pub- lic” itself was forming around the Salon exhibitions as they were at- tended by people from all levels of French society,2 and increasingly

1 Bryson, Word and Image, 154. 2 For a thorough discussion of the emergence of the very idea of “public life” as it relates to the institution of painting in the eighteenth century, see Thomas Crow, 112 Scapeland this “public” saw the Paris school of painting as the best in Europe; Finally, Salon viewers could increasingly see the connections between painting as an institution and literature and the theater. And yet, as Bryson laments, “despite this unique cultural situation, Diderot and Grimm make their decision: The Salons would never reach the public; would never in fact, be printed, but only circulated.”3 Whatever oppor- tunity may have been squandered in Diderot’s time, it is clear that the rediscovery of these Salon writings helped forge a new sense of pur- pose for nineteenth-century art critics such as Baudelaire at the Salon. Baudelaire was confronted in this sphere with an increasing sense that in the Romantic era the painter (rather than the critic) would be viewed as the figure endowed with Romantic authority; the critic was viewed as a mere intermediary between the genius of the painter and a lackluster bourgeois public.4 Diderot’s legacy becomes inspirational particularly in this context as he forges a strong position for the critic as a free, unfettered voice and an imaginative power equal to that of the painter. His body of work shows the power of language to surpass and transcend the visual image that serves as its referent through flights of literary imagination.5 In addition, Baudelaire inherits Dide- rot’s strong sense of the theatrical possibilities for painting and his sense that the work of art’s material existence is perhaps less im- portant than how it is experienced by a reader or spectator. As he writes in the “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris,” “Dans la musique comme dans la peinture, et même dans la parole écrite, qui est cependant la plus positive des arts, il y a toujours une lacune com- plétée par l’imagination de l’auditeur.”6 Baudelaire wrote Salons in 1845, 1846, and 1859 that appeared in the contemporary press, where he achieved a reputation as an art crit-

Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 3 Bryson, Word and Image, 154. None of the Salons was published before 1798, with the result that Diderot’s contemporary Salon public never had access to them. 4 Baudelaire addresses this plight at the beginning of the Salon de 1848 in “A quoi bon la critique?” 5 As Bryson notes, “To and Baudelaire, the Salons of Diderot mean language and painting on a par, and, specifically, a precedent for the kind of where word and image can mutually react against the other as equals and as partners” (Bryson, Word and Image, 155). 6 Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Marcel Ruff. (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968), 512.